Author: Kim O’Connell / Source: Atlas Obscura
On a crisp September night, the rocky coastline around Sand Beach in Acadia National Park feels like the edge of the world. A rapt audience is gathered in the darkness, huddled together on blankets for one of the park’s most popular ranger-led programs: “Stars Over Sand Beach.
” The Milky Way arcs high overhead, spilling stars in every direction in a sparkling spectrum of color—white, yellow, orange, and blue—and the dome of the sky is inky black.The only artificial light comes from the occasional sweep of a flashlight and the faint glow on the horizon from the town of Bar Harbor just a few miles north. With a green laser, a park ranger points out constellations to the crowd: the W-shaped Cassiopeia, the bright star Arcturus in the Boötes constellation, and the cluster stars of the Pleiades.
More than 175 miles away from Sand Beach by car is downtown Portland, Maine. There, like in most urban centers, the muddy bluish-gray or orange glow of the night sky comes not from distant stars, but from light pollution—artificial light that blazes throughout the night on streets, sidewalks, basketball courts, and shopping centers.
In 2017, a multinational research team found that the Earth had gotten brighter at a rate of about two percent each year between 2012 and 2016. Increasingly, denizens of the developed world do not know what Paul Bogard, author of The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light, calls “a wild sky”—the brilliant stars seen over Zion National Park in Utah, or Assateague Island National Seashore in Maryland and Virginia, or Death Valley, California. In addition to obscuring an essential aspect of the natural world, light pollution has been shown to disrupt normal sleep-wake cycles in humans and animals alike and to disorient wildlife in detrimental ways.
To raise awareness about light pollution and create support for conserving natural darkness, public land managers are relying on the growing popularity of astronomy tourism, or “astrotourism” for short. Astrotourism, a term once used to describe tourism in space that now encompasses night sky viewing, is on the rise. The International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) reports that the number of worldwide parks applying to be on the list of certified “International Dark Sky Places” is five times higher than it was eight years ago—with 15 to 20 parks applying for the certification per year now versus just three or four in 2010 and 2011.
In 2017, Condé Nast Traveler declared astrotourism “now a thing” and a joint University of Michigan/NASA study posited that some 215 million Americans watched that year’s total solar eclipse, nearly double the number who had watched the 2017 Super Bowl.
“There’s a growing awareness of light pollution and of environmental issues in general,” says John Barentine, IDA’s director of public policy. “Some of this is a reaction to our increasingly frenetic existence and how we’re tied to our devices and feel increasingly disconnected from nature.”
As stewards of some of the wildest natural areas remaining in the country, the U.S. National Park Service has taken a leading role in promoting the value of the night skies. This is despite the fact that the federal government, which oversees the NPS, has never mandated protection for night skies like it has for water and other natural resources. This contributes to the land managers’ key challenges: limited budgets, a nearly $11 billion maintenance backlog, increased visitation, and development that is pushing ever closer to park boundaries, threatening them with encroaching light pollution.
As a rare bastion of natural darkness on the East Coast, but one whose popularity is booming, Acadia National Park is wrestling with these same issues and offers a good example of what the national parks are doing to preserve their dark nights.
Light pollution has been a fruitful field of study for researchers in recent years, one that the Loss of the Night Network (LoNNe), a multi-national research consortium based in Berlin, Germany, says is growing. In 2015, LoNNe and IDA began tallying relevant journal articles in their Artificial Light at Night (ALAN) research database.
Today, the database has more than 900 published research papers about worldwide light pollution and its impacts on all creatures, including humans. In 2016, for example, the American Medical Association reported that blue-toned LED street lighting was five times more disruptive to the internal biological clock that governs our sleep-wake cycles—our circadian rhythms—than conventional street lighting.
Disrupting the natural light-dark cycle can also have devastating effects on animals that are nocturnal and crepuscular (active in twilight), which rely on the dark for their most essential activities: hunting, eating, and mating. In a study published in early 2018, researchers at the University of South Florida found that house sparrows infected by West Nile virus remained infectious longer when they were exposed to artificial lighting. In 2014, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute issued a report describing how artificial light can disorient turtle species, citing an incident that year in which a car at Gulf Islands National Seashore hit and killed a female loggerhead turtle that was moving towards land-based lights. And in a paper published in 2016, which examined the lighting of under-road wildlife passageways, researchers from Portland State University found that artificial light prevented deer mice, Columbia black-tailed deer, and opossums from crossing.
Because of such threats, since 1999 the National Park Service’s Night Skies Team—now the Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division—has been monitoring the quality…
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